InstaLOD Tutorial and Guide

Okay this s gonna be a relatively quick video on how to remesh and reduce this monster asset into something more reasonable for a real-time engine to utilize. And what I mean by a monster asset is if you see up here in the Tri count it’s 225,000 triangles, and if I bring the hypershade up here you’re gonna see he’s 11 draw calls, so basically; he has 11 materials assigned to him. So if I go here to the body, shader group and select objects right click and select objects with materials, you could see I have a material assigned to his body and those are all laid out in the UV space 0 to 1.

I have his cloak UVed and textured, I have his gun-arm over here broken up into 3 different or 4 different materials, here I’ve got his ammo assigned to one material and again UVed and laid out and zero to one UV Space. He’s a little unwieldy for a game engine right now, so what we’re gonna do is again optimize him utilizing the remesh functionality with an instalod.

Now different from the previous video where we had a high-resolution mesh with no game res; what this basically is is a very high resolution game res asset or is an asset that’s already UVed, already has textures baked to it and we’re going to condense that down into something more reasonable.

To visualize this let’s take a look at this image right here so right now what we have is 11 different draw calls so 11 different materials each one of these colors representing a different material and each material is gonna have 1, 2, 3, 4 textures plugged into it. In this case, its these PBR, he’s gonna have a base color, metallicity, normal and roughness map plugged in. Each one of these maps is 2048 by 2048 and what we’re going to use this remesh functionality to do this time is take all 11 of these materials and make one material and all 44 of these textures and drop it down to just 1, 2, 3, 4 textures in my new material.

As you can see over here, we’re gonna make this a 2048 by 2048 texture for our new material, if you wanted to you don’t have to condense all of these textures into 1 2048, even if you were to double that into a 4096 you can see the footprint isn’t gonna be terribly large certainly not compared to the original object so it’s not a deal breaker for your end result or what you’re gonna be using this in engine for say a character create or a game where you can have a 4096 assigned to your character. Assigning a 4096 may not be a deal breaker for you, now that we have a little bit of a better idea of what we’re doing let’s go ahead and look through some options.